Case Study: Smartling achieves high-performance, low-latency global translation delivery with MongoDB

Smartling - Customer Case Study

Smartling helps companies translate websites and mobile apps through a combination of professional translators, crowdsourcing, and machine translation, compressing translation timelines from months to weeks. As their MySQL database grew, performance and management became bottlenecks—backups and restores were slow, sharding was complex, and latency when rendering HTML and metadata to translators threatened translator productivity and translation quality.

To address this, Smartling moved a core component (their Translation Delivery Network) to MongoDB to store HTML and metadata while keeping text strings in MySQL. MongoDB provided fast reads, automatic data expiry, easy built-in sharding, replica-set high availability, and simpler development, enabling horizontal scaling and reliable low-latency delivery with minimal development effort; Smartling reports improved performance, reduced operational complexity, and plans to expand MongoDB’s role across the platform.

Smartling

Andrey Akselrod

Chief Technology Officer